By Denis Balibouse and Cecile Mantovani 1 October 2024 ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss glaciers melted at an above-average rate in 2024 as a blistering hot summer thawed through abundant snowfall, monitoring body GLAMOS said on Tuesday. Earlier this year, glaciologists had celebrated heavy winter and spring snow dumps in the Alps, hoping this would signal […]
By Seth Borenstein 2 July 2024 (AP) – The melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield, home to more than 1,000 glaciers, is accelerating. The snow covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s, according to a new study. Researchers meticulously tracked snow levels in the nearly 1,500-square mile icy expanse going back […]
19 March 2024 (WMO) – A new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) shows that records were once again broken, and in some cases smashed, for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat. Heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones […]
20 December 2023 (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) – Traces of sunscreen agents were found at the North Pole, on the glaciers of the Svalbard archipelago. They were mainly deposited in winter, when night falls over the Arctic. A study conducted by researchers from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute of Polar Sciences – National […]
By Charlotte Greenfield 22 November 2023 (Reuters) – On the steep slope of a glacier jutting through the Hunza valley in Pakistan’s mountainous far north, Tariq Jamil measures the ice’s movement and snaps photos. Later, he creates a report that includes data from sensors and another camera installed near the Shisper glacier to update his […]
By Jamey Keaten 1 September 2023 GENEVA (AP) – A top glacier watcher has warned that a warm early summer combined with a heat wave last week may have caused severe glacier melt in Switzerland, threatening to make 2023 its second-worst year for ice loss after a record thaw last year. Matthias Huss of the GLAMOS […]
By Elizabeth Rush 13 August 2023 (The Atlantic) – Out on the bow of the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, the air is dense and almost warm. We have punched through miles of Antarctic ice floes to reach the Amundsen Sea’s foggy interior. I want to honor the remaining distance between us and Thwaites Glacier’s calving […]
By Andrew Freedman 24 August 2023 (Axios) – In a summer featuring countless heat domes and record-high temperatures and heat indices, the season appears to have saved the worst for last. The big picture: A sweltering, stagnant air mass is draped across the Central U.S., resulting in “dangerous,” “searing” and “brutal” heat. Meanwhile, southern Europe is also seeing another bout of […]
By Lois Parshley 20 July 2023 (The Atlantic) – Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a […]
By Catherine Martin-Jones 6 July 2023 (University of Cambridge) – As the Arctic warms, shrinking glaciers are exposing bubbling groundwater springs which could provide an underestimated source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, finds new research published today in Nature Geoscience. The study, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University Centre in Svalbard, […]